You were recently awarded a SNSF Doc.CH grant to undertake your doctoral research project, entitled, “Architects of the Better World’: The Birth of the International Conference Complex (1918-1998)”. What is an “international conference complex” and what do you hope to archive by studying them in this project?
John Bolton -with whom, to be sure, I share very little- provocatively named his controversial memoirs The Room where it Happened. I suggest Bolton highlights that, despite our technological gadgets and virtual aspirations, most of international and domestic politics can be traced to concrete rooms in which disputes unfold. This is something, however, that we wouldn’t know from reading the copious literature that has emerged on the history of international law in the last two decades. Most of the work (masterfully, at any rate), has focused on the intellectual biographies of white European or Unitedstatesean Diplomats without paying much heed to the rooms and hallways in which international law is shaped and contested. Hence, in this project, I want to push for a materially-oriented approach to international legal history, in which space itself (and not only diplomats, doctrines, or discourse) is the protagonist. With this in mind, I decided to turn to “international conference complexes”: a term I suggest encompasses the purpose-built spatial and architectural environments that were created to host the “international community” in the short 20th century in what David Kennedy famously called international law’s move to institutions. I am thankful for the generous support provided by the SNSF, my supervisors (Andrea Bianchi, Carolyn Biltoft & Samuel Moyn), and by many friends and mentors based at the IHEID’s Global Governance Centre, Research Office, and its academic departments.
Arguably Geneva has made a name for itself globally as an international conference complex. After all, it hosts some 38 international organisations, 431 non-governmental organisations, and 177 state permanent missions. What could your research mean for how we view places like “International Geneva”?
This project, of course, is profoundly shaped by my experience of living and working in Geneva for the past couple of years. Indeed, I had the opportunity to witness firsthand how the halls, hallways, and corridors of the Palais de Nations offer important resources and constraints to those who participate in law-making projects as a research assistant at the UN International Law Commission. Yet, I must admit that I think the first sketch of the project really came into picture once I had the chance to visit another fascinating conference venue: the Kenyatta Conference Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. While this Centre was erected at roughly the same time as UNOG’s E Building (1967-1973), I felt the two structures embodied two different visions of “internationalism.” For that reason, my research wants to interrogate what are exactly the material and discursive investments required for a city or building to “become international” -and, perhaps most importantly, what are the unequal imaginaries of world ordering that might hide behind those seemingly banal architectonical designs.
Your research project invokes several metaphors. One of them is that of architecture. How does this help you think about international conference complexes and global governance more broadly?
Just this week at a conference, my fellow panelists and I were called “the sons and daughters of the linguistic turn in international law.” While I don’t think the discussant meant this as a compliment, I think this is a good starting point for my intervention. Like many critical scholars, I believe that there is much to say about the ways in which metaphors structure our ways of seeing the world, to paraphrase John Berger. In this vein, I have always found fascinating how many laypeople and (international) lawyers alike tend to draw liberally from metaphors of geography and architecture to conceptualize the inner workings of international law. Indeed, for most, the “international legal order” appears first and foremost as an edifice, with pillars and areas of global regulation. But my work also wants to go beyond the linguistic and discursive, to engage with the concrete and material “architecture of international cooperation” that is so often treated as an empty metaphorical device. This is why I have found the literature from the so-called “new materialisms” so productive – I aspire my project might be read not merely as a product of the linguistic turn but also of the return of materiality in, and beyond, international legal theory.
Your project focuses on the historical intersection between material and imagined spaces. Has the recent shift away from material to digital spaces altered how you are thinking about your main research questions?
Not at all, if anything it has perhaps reinforced my interest in exploring what I have called elsewhere the paradoxical notion of the “materialism of the incorporeal” (following Foucault). Of course, many friendly commentators have suggested that perhaps Covid has shown the inevitable end of space and concrete matters in our age of virtual onslaught. On the contrary, I retort, our current crisis has shown us more than ever how, for all our dreams of taming “nature,” we cannot escape the finite boundaries of our material constraints. Indeed, it seems that a feminist new materialist concern about the politics of the body is more pertinent than ever in our current times of pandemic uncertainties. Moreover, as a student of Science and Technology Studies (STS), I am aware that no technological breakthrough occurs in a vacuum –all scientific innovations draw from the languages, structures, and practices of preexisting social arrangements. I think we see this clearly in our “virtual conference complexes,” which are still full of “breakout rooms,” “plenary sessions,” and “townhalls.” The patterns of 20th century spatial thought are still very much ingrained in our contemporary imaginations of digital encounters. Finally, I must add that spectacular world of virtual platforms cannot be sustained without an often-invisible material infrastructure (another central concept for my work). The “cloud” exists depending on an assemblage of routers, cables, and servers which are very much materially located somewhere (as my colleague and friend Roxana Vatanparast and others have argued). My work aims to bring those hidden material networks to the forefront.
During your Master studies (International Law class of 2020, Graduate Institute), your Mémoire -which was awarded the Mariano Garcia Rubio Prize for best Dissertation) examined the central role of shipping containers in the history of global governance. How did this work shape your current research agenda?
There is both a strong continuity and rupture between my MA dissertation and my current project. With the support of my supervisors (Fuad Zarbiyev and Carolyn Biltoft) and three fascinating academic communities (IHEID, Melbourne Law School’s Institute for International Law and the Humanities, & Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy), I traced a history of the standardization of shipping container materialities in the mid-twentieth Century. The first substantive chapter of the mémoire provided a historiographical critique of the current state of the art in international legal history, laying a case for a “material turn” in the discipline. This piece was published in the Journal of the History of International Law and serves as a fundamental prologue for the PhD dissertation. The following chapter provided a general overview of the many unstable and contradictory “new materialist” approaches, aiming to help international lawyers (who are always one or two decades behind the latest work in social and critical theory) to catch up with these trends. This article was published by International Politics Reviews and its distinction between approaches still informs my current project. Chapter III brings these threads together to offer a concrete history of the process of material standardization that occurred within, and beyond, the International Organization for Standardization in the late fifties and sixties. This article (which is forthcoming at the London Review of International Law) is but the first tentative exploration of a decades-long history that one could trace about containerization and global regulation in the second half of the 20th century. While I am still tempted to pursue this project later in my career, for my doctorate I decided to pursue a materialist interrogation of a more “traditional” infrastructure for my discipline: conference complexes instead of containers. I could talk more about the many reasons which led to this rupture (which, sadly, are mostly related to my fears of finding suitable employment after my doctoral studies), but for now I hope that this project will resonate more with the interests of traditional scholars and practicing international lawyers (especially those who might serve as potential professional gatekeepers later down the line). So far, in conversations with colleagues and at academic conferences, my impression is that this is very much the case.
